Tweetburner - clickthrough rates

Tweetburner lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter. Links can be recognized as "twurl.nl". Tweetburner is an initiative of two entrepreneurs from The Netherlands.


One of the nice features of Tweetburner is that it generates a lot of statistics. Most of these statistics are even public available to everyone interested. As of this writing, Tweetburner has generated 274418 Twurls (shortened URLs), which have alltogether been clicked 2192254 times. This means that on average each shortened URL has been clicked about 8 times.

I had a closer look at 60 Tweetburner users from The Netherlands, the home country of Tweetburner. The full details of these users can be found in the list below. This list contains probably the most active Tweetburner users from The Netherlands combined with several less active users.

The global average clickthrough rate for Tweetburner shortened URLs is about 8 times. The average clickthrough rate for the observerd Dutch Twitter users varied from 4 (@iPieter) to 54 (@erwblo). The clickthrough rates have to be linked to the number of followers for each of the observed Twitter accounts. If a Twitter user has only a limited number of followers, the number of clicks will be probably low. If on the other hand a Twitter user has very high number of followers, the number of clicks will be (very) low. The ratio of average clicks per number of followers varies for the 60 observed Dutch Tweetburner users from 2% (@pixites - 803 followers) to 91% (@tuecursor - 7 followers).


As the graph illustrates, there seems to be a power relationship between the average number of clicks per follower and the number of followers. Twitter users with a very limited number of followers have very high clickthrough rates. Almost all their followers click on the links in their Twitter messages. Twitter users with a high to very high number of followers have a low clickthrough rate (less then 5%).

This is an analysis of 60 Tweetburners users from the Netherlands. These 60 users have only generated less then 2% of all shortened URLs. It remains to be seen if these conclusions can be extrapolated to all Tweetburner users and even further to all Twitter users using URL shortening services (e.g. tinyurl).

This is the full list of the analyzed 60 Tweetburners users from the Netherlands.